“Have you not seen our girls, Paul?” asked his mother, who now seemed no less constrained than he.
“Do go and look about for them; they have gone to the dancing-ground. Tell them not to be too wild, or else they will catch cold.”
“May I not come too, little cousin?” asked cousin Leo.
“You had better remain here,” she answered, lightly, whereupon he declared he should be obliged to kill himself for grief.
“A merry bird,” said Paul, with a sigh of envy, as he walked at her side through the crowd.
“She will marry him, after all,” Paul meditated.
All around people screamed and shouted. A lantern had caught fire, and a troop of young fellows endeavored to tear it from the cord. Flaming pieces of paper were flying through the air, and the liquid was spirted in all directions.
Elsbeth put her arm in his and bent her head on his shoulder. Again that blissful thrill which he could not explain ran through him.
“There, now I am safe,” she said, in a whisper. “Come to the wood afterwards, Paul, I have so much to tell you; there we shall be undisturbed.”
And as she said this he felt quite anxious, out of pure joy.
They had come to the dancing-place. The trumpets resounded, and the dancers were spinning round and round.
“Shall we dance, too?” she asked, smiling.
“That does not matter,” she said; “for those sort of things Leo does well enough.”
His foolish dreams which he had had under the juniper-bush to-day occurred to him.
“So it is with everything that I fancy to myself,” he thought. “I have still one of your books, Elsbeth,” he said then.
“I know, I know,” she answered, looking up at him with a smile.
“Oh, what a fidget you are,” she jested. “Leo meanwhile has ruined my whole library for me, and wants me now to replenish it for him, because he has nothing more to read.”
“Have you read much that is beautiful in it?” she asked him.
“Now? Oh, good heavens, I have so much to think of in every-day life--they won’t fit into my head any longer.”
“Nor into mine, either, Paul. It is because we have seen too much of life; poetry is lost to us.”
“You see, for five years I have been sick-nurse; there are many sad hours, and when the night-light burns, and one’s eyes hurt with watching so much, and outside the storm rattles the shutters, many thoughts come to one about life and death, about love and loneliness--well, in short, one makes a book of poetry in one’s own head and does not read other people’s any more. But come away from this noise; I should like to ask you so much, and here one can hardly hear one’s own voice.”